After several years of the FBI's
pother about the dire threat of "terrorism from
the right," a rather more real terrorism from the
left descended upon the city of Seattle this week
with a fury.

Ever since the Oklahoma City
bombing in 1995, the FBI and the Clinton-Reno
Justice Department have muttered and moaned about
the slaughter and destruction the "extreme
right" was getting ready to inflict upon the country.
Only last month the Bureau released a near-hysterical
report on the danger the country faces
from right-wingers who worry about a "New World
Order" and the approaching millennium.

But while the Bureau and its
political masters have obsessed over the right,
the real danger started smashing windows in
Seattle this week, where the World Trade Organization
was trying to hold a meeting. There are indeed
many aspects of the WTO that correctly worry
people on the right, but you don't have to
be J. Edgar Hoover to deduce that the characters causing
violence in Seattle were not from the right
at all.

To judge from the news reports,
just about every weirdo and whacko and wigged-out
eco-freak this side of the moons of Neptune
arrived in Seattle to caper and cavort
about his, her or its favorite bogey-man, to smash
windows and throw whatever could be lifted and
hurled in protest of whatever it was they were protesting.

Crackpots dressed up as what
the Washington Post described as "pigs, turtles,
clowns, Superman, vegetables, fish and
butterflies" to dramatize the supposed threat
the WTO represents to all these creatures,
entities and fictitious beings. Others, perhaps
a bit more serious, dressed up in "black
clothes and ski masks" and threw newspaper vending
machines into the streets, while still
others sacked a MacDonald's, symbol of corporate
power, and then looted a Starbuck's, which,
one supposes, is guilty of genocide against coffee
beans.

Anarchists as well as members
of the Wicca cult were there too, but nowhere
do the news reports tell of any militia members,
"white supremacists," Christian fundamentalists or
other adherents of what is now routinely lumped
together as the "Far Right."

Yet those groups have at least
as much reason to object to the WTO as their counterparts
on the left do. The fact that the fruitier
side of the right was conspicuous by its absence in
Seattle ought to tell us (if not the FBI) something
important: The strength, as well as the danger,
of such groups has been grotesquely overrated.
The Bureau and its "terrorist expert" munchkins
need to go back to their drawing boards and
try to figure out where the real threat of violence
is coming from before other cities get their
windows smashed like Seattle.

The real danger the WTO represents
in fact quite sails past the heads of the
window-smashers. The real danger is that the
WTO threatens both national sovereignty and local
self-government, as well as the economic and
cultural underpinnings of nationality.
It is no small irony of the left-wing ranting about
the WTO that what the left demands as a corrective
would in fact intensify the WTO's dangers.

What the left demands is that
environmental, health, labor and other regulatory
rules be written into the WTO's charter, with
the result that these rules would then themselves
become part of the globalized world state. What
the crazies and crackpots of the left want,
in other words, is more of what is wrong with the WTO
in the first place.

By contrast, the right-wing objection
to the WTO is that its very structure is
an invasion of national sovereignty -- by enforcing
bureaucratically formulated (not constitutionally
enacted) rules that govern what a nation can produce
and sell -- and that in practice the WTO has
enforced those rules against the interests of the
United States and its businesses and workers.

WTO Director General Michael
Moore said this week the attack on his organization
is part of "a broader assault on internationalism
-- on foreigners, immigration, a more
pluralistic and integrated world." Allowing
for some exaggeration and tendentiousness
in his comment, he's right. The WTO
represents the New World Order, the effort
to "integrate" the whole planet into a single dominant
bureaucratic framework that overrides national
and local governments, throws away sovereignty
and disintegrates cultural, racial,
and institutional fabrics. Those who resist it
for the right reasons do so because it endangers their
identities, their ways of life.

It will take a good deal more
than smashing a few windows and dressing up like
vegetables and butterflies to stop the threat
that the WTO's globalization represents. More
than anything else, it will take a deeper
understanding of what nationality -- and liberty --
mean than anyone on the left or most people on the
right seem today to possess.